Ever since its launch in November 2010, Blekko has been on a mission to eliminate spam and content farms from search results.The human-curated search engine, which is also known both for using actual mammals to edit search results and for its employ of slashtags for easy categorization, announced in March that it had banned over 1 million spammy domain names from its site. Using a new algorithm it calls “AdSpam”, Blekko investigates the quality of a doman’s content, as well as the type of ads it includes, to identify those of the lowest quality. Those that don’t pass muster get the boot — which should be music to any searcher’s ears.

Excerpt from the article written by Kevan Lee and posted on Buffer Blog:"Finding and sharing exquisite content has never had more value than it does today.

What is content curation?Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.Or another definition:"In a world of nearly infinite content, consumers are looking to one-stop shop." by Mike Kaput

Curation is not aggregation.Aggregation is algorithmic. Curation is handpicked.The human element of curation is a huge source of its value.

Significant benefits to a good content curation strategy include:- You improve your relationship with the sites whose content you share.- You grow your authority on a subject (provided the curation is top-notch).- You add quality content to your site or timeline and create a great resource for others.- You save time from creating content yourself, from scratch.

Examples of where you might use content curation:- Curate content in a weekly blog post.- Curate content in an email newsletter.- Curate content on your social media profiles.

How to curate content as efficiently and expertly as possible.Certainly, there is a time investment involved in doing it right (as with most things done well). There are a number of resources, tools, and tricks that help make the curation process even easier. Here’s what’s involved.

-Find unique places to discover exquisite contentWe collected 17 off-the-radar places to search for new content. The off-the-radar spots are often quite good; there’s content on those sites that your audience may not have seen before, which adds an immediate boost of credibility for you and a boost of value your readers.

- Read what you findI can admit to being tempted to skim a story and share it—or skip the skimming altogether and jump straight to sharing! There’s just so much content to read and so little time.I’m clearly not alone in this temptation. Do people read what they share? Not exactly.

- Pick out your favoritesAs you read, make note of the stories that really stood out to you and that you’d like to share. There are a number of different ways of organizing these, ranging from old-school to highly automated.

Batch and schedule: The shortcut to social curationIf you choose to share your curation on social media (great idea!), you have a number of tools at your disposal and one neat time-saving trick: Batch and schedule.

Inside the Buffer curation processCuration is a regular part of our daily activities here at Buffer, both in our social media marketing and in the Buffer product itself. We share the best stories we can find from our archives and from the web to our profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, and we curate a list of content suggestions that are offered fresh each day for folks to pick up and add to their buffers..."

Excerpt from the article on Scoop.it Blog:"According to the Content Marketing Institute, original content should be the cornerstone of your content marketing. And curating content can raise your brand awareness and bring more visitors to your website. Specifically in education, EdTech consultants, teachers and librarians are doing a great job combining creation and curation to showcase student creativity.

2. Edudemic - EdTech blogEdudemic’s website hosts a community of educators and technologists looking to enhance learning. Not only does the community post original content on the website, they also use Twitter and Feedly to create and curate.

3. TechChef4u - EdTech specialist, blogger, speakerLisa Johnson is using a variety of digital creation and curation tools to establish her TechChef4u brand as one of the most influential in the EdTech space.

4. University of San Francisco - Higher education institutionThe University of San Francisco builds community and maintains an exciting and engaging online presence by collecting content that’s shared by over 10,000 people and curates the best of it to share with the world..."

From "about us" of Official Website:"Yesterday (May 13, 2014), The Times launched a closed beta of a new product, NYT Cooking.

NYT Cooking is an intuitive and dynamic recipe box designed to make cooking easier. The site features more than 15.000 recipes from The Times archive to browse and search. Users can save their favorite recipes to a digital recipe box, get inspired with hand-picked collections of recipes from Times cooks, create custom recipe collections of their own and learn how to make recipes with instructional videos featuring Melissa Clark, Sam Sifton and Mark Bittman, among others.

The limited web beta will be available to approximately 10.000 NYTimes.com users. The Times will use the beta to develop insights on how users interact with the product, and to learn from those insights as it approaches the launch of the full product later this year..."

Now I am surfing into site, and there are some key sections:- RECIPE BOXAnywhere you see a recipe, you can drag it into this drawer and access your saved recipes here at any time.You can also group recipes together to create menus or plan a meal by creating a collection. Use the button below to get started.

- RECIPESMore than 16.000 recipes now: there is a box search or you can use related filters as Barbecue, Dairy-Free, Dinner, Japanese, Middle Eastern, Soup.Other different filters with key related words are: diets, cuisines, preparation methods, meal types, and more.

- TIMES COOKSThey are your guides to NYT Cooking. Use your recipe boxes as inspiration for recipes and the start of your own collections.

Excerpt from review article by Mashable:"Adobe is focusing on providing more tools for its mobile users. The company rolled out Adobe Voice Thursday, an all-new storytelling app for iPad users.

The app gives users a way to easily create and share animated videos that combine images, music, voice recordings and special effects.

The app is meant be simple to use, and provide people — especially those who may not be able to use traditional video-editing software — with ways to tell stories through video.

Users begin by choosing from a preset story template that helps outline the structure of their video. They can then import their own photos, draw from the app's library of 25,000 icons or search the web for their own images.

Adobe also included specially created soundtracks, so users can add music to fit the story. Users can also record their own voiceovers..."

Excerpt from the review article by The New York Times:"Social media users know the frustration: a deluge of videos, images and music clips flows through their news feeds all the time, some of it precious but mostly not.

The people behind Milq, a new website and app, say they have one solution: change the network. Milq lets users organize songs, video clips and other bits of media around common themes, resulting in something like collaborative mixtapes.

By trying to tame the web’s chaos through communities of taste, Milq is entering a crowded field of websites and apps that are betting on the power of human “curation”.Perhaps Milq’s closest competitor is Pinterest, but Milq sees that personal process and raises it with group curation.To do this, Milq has come up with something like a new atomic particle of online media: the bead. Milq is set up as a permanent collection of topic pages, or beads, each containing media clips posted by users.

Milq is free to use, on the web or on iPhones. (An Android app is being developed, the founders said.) But the involvement of corporate sponsors and media outlets is crucial to its expansion.Condé Nast is an early media partner, and has been exploring ways to incorporate beads on its magazines’ sites..."

"Vellum is a new free web app born out of a quick experiment at the New York Times R&D labs which allows you to see all of the most relevant Twitter stories coming from the people you follow, stripped of their commentary and showing their original title, description and source.

Vellum filters out text only tweets that contain no links, eliminates duplicates and surfaces only those tweets that have already been retweeted by multiple people.

Excerpt from the article by The Next Web:"Google is testing a new favoriting service for its Chrome browser. Called Google Stars, the new option appears to still in very early testing.The new addition was first discovered by Google+ user Florian Kiersch. He found the following strings in “the source code of the Google Collections modules in web search”.

Here are some of the strings that reveal a bit about the feature:- Use the star in the address bar to save anything across the web.- Search the entire page content with suggestions and auto complete.- Discover new dimensions in your content through the automatically created filters.- Browse and find your stars in a beautiful image rich grid. Add notes and make it yours.- Select, and edit items to organize your starred content by clicking on them or dragging and dropping.- Organize your starred items into groups, by typing a name for a new group here.

It does tell us this is a Chrome-specific feature.In short, Google Stars supports favoriting (called starring) URLs, lets you add a title and a note, includes folders, and sharing functionality (both public and private). How much of all this will remain in the final release, is not clear.The real interesting aspect here is that Stars appears to be a cloud service that allows for sharing..."

This is the description about Amoeba by Sanya Rai from the video on Vimeo:"Amoeba is a wearable device that analyses your bio-parameters to understand your interest levels.It is designed to help you intuitively sift through your digital content while it analyses your likes and dislikes in the background."

Yesterday, April 16, 2014, CNET Australia posted its review article about Amoeba.Here is an excerpt from it:"What if Google Glass could tell when you were interested in something — and recommend personally curated content based on a cumulative database of your likes and dislikes?

We've already seen tech that responds automatically to your physiological responses; but None of these, however, have really made their way into the mainstream — but the technology has definite potential. Take a concept created by Sanya Rai, Carine Collé and Florian Puech, students at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in the UK.It's called Amoeba, and it's an eyeglass designed to be worn when you spend time on the web.

"We envision that you would wear the Amoeba device before you start your web-based research," Rai wrote on her website. "As you go through different web pages, the device senses your bio-data and quantifies your interest. When you are done, you can then go to the Amoeba app and select the keyword you were looking at. The app will show you a time-based summary of all links visited, layering them based on how interesting you found the content. You also have the option of seeing the route you took to arrive at a certain page, thus enabling better reflection and self awareness."The device has sensors to measure three involuntary physical responses: your perspiration rate, your pupillary dilation and your respiration rate.

The team believes this could have several potential uses. Firstly, providing advertisers with honest feedback. Another is measuring student engagement in education. For the user, of course, it could help unearth content that they otherwise might not find for themselves — a pretty intriguing prospect, although we suspect some might baulk at the notion that everything they engage with is being fed to a database and potentially sold.

Still, at the moment it's only a concept, and one would hope it would remain optional, even if the team were to achieve their dream. "Our final vision would be to have Amoeba as an embedded feature in all wearable devices so that it can help streamline all content for the user, bringing to the forefront only the most interesting stuff rather than the entire daily log of data," Rai said..."

Excerpt from the article by Search Engine Land:"Google has added two more filter and delivery options to Google Alerts. Google Alerts informs you of updates within Google results via email or RSS feed. The two new filters let you refine those alerts by language or region..."

Excerpt from article written By Mathew Ingram and published on GigaOM:"BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti compares a nine-year-old website known primarily for its “listicles” and funny cat GIFs to a venerable and award-winning newsmagazine like Time. There are a lot more similarities between Time magazine and BuzzFeed than even most media-industry watchers would probably care to admit.

Peretti describes how he started reading David Halberstam’s book “The Powers That Be"...“The stories in the book, which was first published in 1979, are great reminders that even traditional media companies like Time Inc., CBS, and the New York Times were once small startups. In those early days, they had many similarities to BuzzFeed and other new web startups that are emerging today.”

As the BuzzFeed founder notes, Time magazine started as just a crazy plan hatched by a couple of twenty-something former university friends named Henry Luce and Briton Hadden. Their bright idea? To take news that had already been reported by other more mainstream media organizations and summarize it, make it more readable and more entertaining, but mostly short enough so people could catch up on the news. In other words, the first modern newsmagazine.

In case you missed it, that sounds an awful lot like what BuzzFeed and others, including Gawker and The Huffington Post, did when they first arrived on the scene: they aggregated and highlighted content from other outlets and made it more user-friendly, made it more entertaining. That may be difficult to reconcile with the Time magazine we know now, but that’s how the empire began (others were also summarizing the news, including a startup called Reader’s Digest).

“Time began as a clipping service in a small office. A group of writers subscribed to a dozen newspapers and summarized the most important stories, rewriting the news in a more digestible format. BuzzFeed also started as a clipping service in a small office seven years ago. Instead of subscribing to newspapers, we surfed the web.”

“Again and again, the conventional wisdom was dismissive of every new medium; each new communications technology was seen as a fad, a tool for demagoguery, or the end of journalism. And always these skeptics were proven wrong, usually by newbies who didn’t care about the old way things were done.”...

From Add-on About page:"Super Drag extends the feature of drag & drop. For example, you can drag a link to open it in a new background, foreground and current tab. You can also drag text to search, by using the default search engine, or select what you want. And for image, you can drag it to view in a background tab, foreground tab, or save it to the default download location.

Super Drag supports links, text and images.- links: open it in background tab, foreground tab or current tab.- text: search it in background tab, foreground tab or current tab.- images: open it in background tab, foreground tab or save it."

Excerpt from the guest post by Bryan Kramer, author of the new ebook "There is no B2B or B2C: Human to Human", and published on Brian Solis Blog."Marketing has become so complex, in segmenting audiences into “B2B” (business to business) and “B2C” (business to consumer).This, plus the rise of social, digital and mobile channels, have created an atmosphere of anonymity.I fear that the social/digital/mobile world has created an angry mob of anonymous reactors who take short form communication literally.

That’s where “H2H” came from.The dawn of a more social web, i.e. forums, discussion boards, and pre- Web 2.0 online communities, would eventually equalize the media landscape and give a voice and brand to customers while introducing the need for a human persona in business. As Brian says of P2P, "people are now brands and brands are now people."This evolution has been guiding our society back into one that requires a more personal approach.

- Speaking HumanConsumers are confused. Why can’t we make it simple for people to understand what we’re selling, so they can more easily share their experiences and the value they felt with others?Don’t care what language you speak, who your brand is or what message you’re trying to send, we all need to speak more human.

- A Human Approach: Social Sensory MarketingThe future of social marketing involves “human sensory building”, and how it will become necessary to intertwine this approach into the marketing experience at each stage of the customer lifecycle. When we are able to weave directly relatable human experiences into social situations, it changes how we share and consume information forever.

- Customers are Fickle HumansCustomers, as humans, are fickle and are so empowered today that they expect extraordinary, over-the-top experiences that rock their world.Customers are ready to move on unless they have one thing – an undying relationship with a person or people at your brand who made them feel uniquely special.

- Becoming Better StorytellersHumans require context to understand concepts. Without boundaries, short bursts of communication, coupled with a faster-paced, noisy society and shorter attention spans is affecting how we, as humans, tell stories.We need to become better storytellers. Storytelling is a great way to communicate how you feel, or how you want your audience to feel. A story helps us understand how things fit into our individual experiences and gives us context to make decisions. Stories add the color, personality and relevance about what you’re trying to sell..."

We've had great success with B2B marketing by remembering that these prospects are people first, B2B second. The shift to thinking about your program as H2H marketing is definitely one to watch. Must-read article!

"FeedShare is an excellent free online resource to find curated reading lists of RSS feeds on specific topics.FeedShare is in fact an open-source web app which allows you to easily upload and share your OPML file with others..."

Excerpt from the article on Heidi Cohen's Blog:"Content curation requires special skills, specifically, a strong point of view and expertise at content selection and presentation. It takes an expert with in-depth area knowledge to pick the content gems your audience seeks and needs.

1. Provide editorial selection expertise.Become known as a trustworthy filter and thought leader on a specific topic.

Excerpt from article on Scoop.it Blog:"You are now over 1 million curators on Scoop.it – content marketers, community managers, thought leaders and knowledge managers: curation has demonstrated its effectiveness in helping built visibility and reputation for pros and businesses.

But the point now is … we love reading what you curate!We are excited to announce “TLDR by Scoop.it!“

TL;DR, as you know, means “Too Long, Didn’t Read.” TLDR by Scoop.it is a digest of content curated by the Scoop.it community. It captures the time saving benefit of curation in this overloaded Internet.

Make no mistake: curated content isn’t always faster to read; one could even argue that the curator’s insight adds to the reading time. This is valid. But the real time-consuming task on the Internet is not reading good content. It’s finding good content; extracting the signal from the noise. Once all search and filtering time is factored in, human curation by like-minded experts is the most time effective way to read relevant content. Hence, TLDR.

TLDR shows your work to the world: it offers direct access to relevant, curated content to a whole new audience..."

Excerpt from review article by Mashable:"Survivors and witnesses of the Sept. 11 attacks and the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 now have a digital venue to share their stories, thanks to a new initiative the National September 11 Memorial and Museum launched on Wednesday.

The 9/11 Memorial Registries collect and share the personal experiences of survivors and rescue workers, as well as information about existing Sept. 11 memorials around the world. The interactive site, which technology and design company Infusion engineered and Microsoft sponsored, also invites the public to share firsthand testimonials from the attacks.

It's divided into three sections: the Rescue and Recovery Registry, which documents first-person stories of rescue, investigation, cleanup and relief efforts; the Witnesses and Survivors Registry, which includes the experiences of those who survived the events; and the Memorials Registry, which tracks Sept. 11 memorials across the globe through an interactive map.

Joe Daniels, 9/11 Memorial president, called it a "unique web experience that captures this important history through the perspectives of those men and women who lived through it."..."

Northwestern University Knight Lab is developing its smarter Twitter search tool: twXplorer and was launched at the end of 2013. It’s made its way into the toolboxes of journalists and non-journalists alike and offers a more convenient and organized way of finding and tracking Twitter content.

Key features are:- Search Twitter for a word or phrase in 12 different languages;- View popular terms, hashtags and links found in your searches;- Save snapshots for later viewing.

From About Page how it works:

Sign InYou have to sign in before you can use twXplorer. You do this using OAuth, which is an authentication protocol that allows users to approve applications to act on their behalf without sharing their password.

Search queriesEnter a query in the search box, pick a language, and hit the search button. To provide a relatively swift response, and comply with Twitter's API limits, twXplorer finds the 500 most recent tweets that include your search terms. If twXplorer reports finding 400 tweets, it means it found 400 unique tweets–which you can scroll through–and 100 “new style” retweets.

Search resultsFor any search terms you enter into twXplorer, you get four different ways to see your search results:- Up to 500 recent tweets containing the terms you entered;- In tweets that include your search terms;- The most popular hashtags;- The most popular links.

ListsThis search provides information about tweets on Twitter lists you have created or subscribed to (maximum of 100).

SnapshotsYou can save a set of results by clicking on "Save Snapshot." You can view everything you've saved by clicking on "saved snapshots."....

Excerpt from the review article by Search Engine Land:"Pinterest wants to help its users find what they are looking for even if they don’t know what exactly that is. The company’s solution, Guided Search, is a predictive search engine powered by social curation.

Announced last night at Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters, Guided Search was presented by CEO Ben Silbermann as a breakthrough for people exploring Pinterest, “the world’s largest human created collection of things.”

Regular search is great — the most amazing invention, Silbermann said — but it’s best for answering specific questions. Users of Pinterest need something better to sift through the billions of pieces of content on the visual social bookmarking site.

And because 75% of Pinterest usage is on mobile devices, the company is focusing on mobile development. Guided Search is a mobile only product, released within updated iOS and Android apps in the Apple and Google Play stores last night. A desktop version will come later, but no timetable was given.Pinterest aimed to minimize typing by improving autocomplete and giving each suggestion a compelling visual representation. They made the search bar more prominent and added a new visual parasol of guides directly below it..."

Excerpt from Google Inside Search (The Official Google Search Blog):"Google Trends is a helpful place to see what people are searching for around the world. You can keep up with hot searches in real time, or take a historical look at trends dating back to 2004. Started some days ago, it’s easier to get just the right insights at just the right time with email notifications.

You can now "Subscribe" to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart. You can also subscribe to email notifications about search interest in any topic you'd like.

If you decide you’re getting too many notifications, there’s an easy “unsubscribe” link in every email, or you can manage your preference on the Trends website in the new "subscriptions" section..."

The Verification Handbook, released two months ago by the European Journalism Centre, features tools and advice on verifying content in breaking news situations.

From book intro:"The Verification Handbook is a groundbreaking new resource for journalists and aid responders, which provides step-by-step guidelines for using user-generated content (UGC) during emergencies.

In a crisis situation, social networks are overloaded with situational updates, calls for relief, reports of new developments, and rescue information. Reporting the right information is often critical in shaping responses from the public and relief workers; it can literally be a matter of life or death.

The Handbook prescribes best practice advice on how to verify and use this information provided by the crowd, as well as actionable advice to facilitate disaster preparedness in newsrooms.

While it primarily targets journalists and aid providers, the Handbook can be used by anyone. It’s advice and guidance are valuable whether you are a news journalist, citizen reporter, relief responder, volunteer, journalism school student, emergency communication specialist, or an academic researching social media."

Interesting excerpt for my topic from the article by PandoDaily:"Is all social platform content inherently untrustworthy or is it possible to elevate it with journalism’s standards of higher quality and ethics?

We know that traditional methods of screening – e.g. professional editors directly supervising every piece of content – aren’t going to work. Social sites generate too much content for that.

Before despairing the conflict is irresolvable, I’d point out that even some professional journalists rely heavily on Wikipedia, perhaps the best example of generally high-quality crowd-sourced content.

The fact is, there are ways to improve the quality, and reliability of social journalism.Here are a bunch of practical suggestions about how to bring journalistic ethos to the new hybrid models.

- Publish staff, contributor and reader credentials as part of a profile linked to all their bylines. I recommend LinkedIn style profiles, with links to articles written for the site or anyone else. Let the audience have plenty of information to decide if a contributor is trustworthy.

- Signing up a guest or expert contributor is a tacit endorsement.

- Business publication, in particular, should consider mandating that contributors take formal online ethics training.

- Getting featured on a content channel should require a curator’s approval (paid professionals or expert volunteers), rather than automated inclusion based on subject matter or pre-approval of the author.

- Consistently highly-scoring content contributors (including staff) should be labeled as such, so they can gain a reputation as being trustworthy.

- If content has been rejected by curators, or not socially shared, or has poor engagement time and few up votes, screen it for deletion. Provide feedback to contributors facing deletion. Social journalism is not just about increasing the amount of content. It’s about increasing quality of information..."

"Many content curation startups, and many of the people using curation tools will probably not like what I have written in this article, but I have a hard time behaving as if I couldn't see a cardboard façade that's been sold for a real destination.

Content Curation has been hijacked and has been sold as a cheap and easy solution for content marketers plagued by the growing problem of getting greater attention from their readers and therefore of how to produce more quality content within tighter and tighter time constraints..."

Personally I call them differently as content "management" and "curation"; as though with management we haven´t the added value of the personal point of view of the curator, still it is a great job to find and select good, quality content.

Excerpt from the review article by TechCrunch:"VideoGenie has launched a new product that it calls StoryBox, which aggregates all kinds of content about a brand. The company says the testimonials can include tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram photos, and more, all presented in what Nassiri (VideoGenie's CEO) called “a rich, visual environment” on the brand’s site, and with the option for visitors to add their own stories directly from the site.

Naturally, brands can curate the content, so that a tweet with the wrong message doesn’t end up in the StoryBox. At the same time, Nassiri said the product offers analytics showing which content is getting the most engagement and (when relevant) driving the most sales. StoryBox can automatically prioritize the best-performing content and display it prominently on the site..."

Excerpt from the guest post by Patricia Hume, President of Trapit, and published on MarketingProfs:"It's impossible for marketers to create enough original, quality material for each channel every day, which is why many rely on content curation to help build brand awareness and generate leads via social media and email marketing.

Here are five of the top content curation mistakes that B2B marketers need to avoid if they want to offer their audiences value, rather than noise.

1. Skimming the Headline and Sharing ImmediatelyA good headline doesn't mean a good article. Sometimes, it doesn't even mean a relevant article. That's why it's important to take the time to read the entire article before sharing it with an audience.Content curation is about showing thought leadership, too; so, if you don't engage with the article yourself, then you can't show your expertise about the topic.

2. Checking Only the Most Popular Stories and Sources for ContentIf your content curation is supposed to attract people to the brand for originality and thought leadership, depending on the most-visited sources and most-read articles is merely going to backfire. Your social media accounts won't stand out, and prospects and customers won't see the value in following them.

3. Not Personalizing for Your AudienceIn a world of almost infinite content, your audience is going to be interested only in the stories that are most relevant to their needs.You should carefully consider the target audience for each piece of curated content.

4. Promoting the Same Content Across Every ChannelOne tactic that's employed by time-starved marketers is to share one link across a few different channels, all at once.Ultimately, doing so undermines the purpose of content curation.

5. Spending Too Much Time Curating ContentIt can take hours to create a blog post, and just a few minutes to curate content. So marketers may write blog posts a few days a week and fill the gaps in output with curated content very quickly.But curating good content that effectively engages the audience—and making sure each piece is promoted and distributed in the context of each social environment—can take hours..."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.